When you first setup your blog, you’re going to see something similar to yourdomain.com/?p=7, and for search engine optimization purposes, this is a big no-no.
No-one will know by seeing your URL what that link is about. This is why you want to change this, and you want to do this as SOON as you get your blog setup.
What Is The Best Permalink Structure?
For most sites you can get away with using only the /%postname%/ option as your custom structure. It’s the one I use here, and it’s the one I highly recommend. Many sites use this that post daily with no problems.
On news sites, (those that will be posting news daily, sometimes several times a day) it might be best to have a day and name structure. Your site would look like yourname.com/2009/01/09/postnamehere
This is not the best permalink structure for SEO purposes, but if you are going to do a lot of posting and updates, I’m sure you will agree it is better than p=7.
If you’re going to write highly useful content that isn’t date sensitive (meaning not a news site) then the absolute BEST structure is /%postname%.
With this structure your blog will look like – yourname.com/my-cat-eats-fish.
The reason this is useful for SEO purposes is because this keeps your keywords closer to your domain. It’s also is much cleaner.
Another useful option is to add categories to your permalinks. To use this feature you need to select /%category%/%postname%/ as your custom structure.
Your site will now look like yourname.com/chicken/why-you-should-eat-chicken
Keyword stuffing is dead, so don’t think you’re going to get away with having eatingchickenblog.com/chicken-blog/eating-chicken-blog-today as your URL, that’s just stupid 
and it won’t work, you might even get slapped (in real life and with Google!)
Another option is to add %post_id% to your permalink, this way your chicken example would have a /2031/ after the URL, and the next one would say /5043/ at the end of the URL, that way they can have the same name, and your keywords are close to your URL name.
(Another reason this is useful is if you want to get into Google News, then you need a unique number at the end of your post (3 digits minimum))
How Do I Change My Permalinks?
- Login to the dashboard of your WordPress blog, under settings click permalink.
- Change the permalink structure to whatever you feel is appropriate, and then click save changes.
- If your .htaccess file is not automatically updated, you may need to create one. Open up your favorite text editor, like notepad, textedit, gedit, whatever works for you, as long as it is a TEXT editor, not a Word Processor, and type in the code that WordPress spits out when you clicked Save Changes, and then save the file as htaccess (note I did not put the .)
- Open up your FTP program, login to your server, and transfer the file to your root directory, then select the file, and rename it to .htaccess, and all should be well.
What If I Have Been Using Bad Permalinks And I Already Got Backlinks?
If you have already been blogging for sometime, and have not changed your permalink structure or you want to, but your afraid you will loose your backlinks, (or you do not want to wait weeks or months to get reindexed in the search engines), you need to install the Redirection plugin.
You can download redirection here → http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/ This will automatically create 301 redirections for you, so when they go to the old url the p=7 url, they will be redirected to you new, pretty, SEO optimized url.
Best SEO WordPress Permalink Structure Video
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this article, and hope you understand the power of optimizing your permalinks for SEO purposes. I want you to go ahead and get rid of your “ugly url” and replace it with a “pretty url” as quickly as possible.
With the redirect plugin, your older links will automatically redirect to the new ones. Talk to you soon.
PS, if you really want to maximize your SEO efforts, I can’t recommend a better plugin than the one below. It’s like having an SEO Genius next to your computer. It’s amazing. I use it here and I can’t recommend it enough.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for this post – been trying to figure out the best method for a month. I also just started your course.
How about month/year/postname? moth+year is too much numbers for search engines, so that the URL may lose positions in search results?
Twitter: jasonannas
December 31, 2009 at 5:31 am
Hey Daniel, as long as you are creating valuable content, stuff people want to read with keyword rich (and appropriate) headlines, it won’t matter that much, really.
If you think you’ll be adding more content that may be similar on your blog year/month/postname will be fine (I recommend that order).
This post here is posted as:
http://enlightenedwebmastery.com/best-seo-wordpress-permalink-structure
With the year and month, it would look like
http://enlightenedwebmastery.com/2009/12/best-seo-wordpress-permalink-structure
To get this you will set your site as:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%
This custom structure is better than the default date, which also includes a day in the URL.
For smaller mini sites where there’s not going to be too much information or posts I use %postname% as it is the most optimal. You can also use this on sites that post content almost daily.
In the end choose whatever you think will work best for you (and most importantly) your users.
I’d recommend doing a brief survey in your niche and see what structure they are using, the notice how they rank for certain terms.
To recap:
/%postname% is very streamlined and cuts to the chase, it also leaves you with a much smaller URL (important if you have a keyword heavy post, such as this one).
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname% works as well, and might be more appropriate for your blog. Note it will add 6 additional characters to the URL, but that’s not enough to cause any kind of harm.
I hope this is helpful and not too confusing.
Twitter: pagesale
February 15, 2010 at 9:52 pm
I am using the /%category%/%postname%/ structure, I’m just curious considering my post to my blog belongs to a subcategory and to the main category which shows a long url to read. Is it safe to have this kind of structure in the long run? or does it have any drawbacks?
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Thank you, this was really helpful. I’m still a little torn though between the day structure and month structure for my site. It’s a news site and I usually post a half dozen or more articles every day.
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Hey good post. I tried the redirection plugin and it doesn’t do the redirects automatically. I’ve read forum postings where people have had similar problems.
Some articles suggest that Google prefers .html at the end of the post title? What are your thoughts on this?
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Twitter: sheridanflynn
May 26, 2010 at 3:14 am
great, thanks for this tutorial! worked perfectly for me.
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